


binary anomalies

by Huntsmonsters



Category: BioShock Infinite
Genre: Gen, SCIENCE!, badass lady scientists, lutece twins - Freeform, luteces - Freeform, science bros from across a crowded multiverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-14
Updated: 2014-08-14
Packaged: 2018-02-13 02:41:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2134065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Huntsmonsters/pseuds/Huntsmonsters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>It is as if she fully experiences something with another human for the first time, like her heart beats with another’s as they possess the same moment of triumph and terror together as one creature. It is love, as the old songs say it will be, and it sings into the machine.</i>
</p><p>The story of Rosalind Lutece; or, one girl's imaginary friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	binary anomalies

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sitting in my docs for months now, waiting for me to polish and post. Essentially, everything about Rosalind made me crave a good lady scientist, turn of the century, it's hard out here for an early feminist fic, and I couldn't find one I liked so I wrote one. Expect Timey-Wimeyness.
> 
> The flexible tenses are purposeful, as should make a bit more sense by the end.

The first sign of life on the other side of the mechanism comes through in the smallest of ways. Anomalies. Rosalind is taken with anomalies, being one.

As a child, she was a great many things she ought not to be. She came into a wealthy family at the end of an era of restraint and mourning, mourning, mourning. There she was, a squalid, pale, writhing little thing in her mother’s arms, and her mother hated.

Her mother went on hating. Oh, Madame Lutece had never wanted to bear children. She despised them, really. But children were a side effect of marriage, marriage that guaranteed stability and status, and these were things Madame Lutece did want. She allowed for children. To leave the house of her youth, close to the high bluffs in the west country, to move to London and participate in season after season of social gaiety, she needed to secure a husband, and the price for such escape was squealing, burbling babies.

Enter the husband. Monsieur Lutece was a Frenchman on holiday, visiting London to take in the sights and to absorb a little education from Englishwomen, notorious for their restraint in the drawing room and their looseness in the bedroom. He had seen many of the old comedies performed - ‘Bartholomew Faire’ was a favorite - and he felt that literature had taught him exactly what English women were capable of. 

The next bit was classic and highly strung and a little bit sad. At the balls, visiting young, marriageable women, Monsieur Lutece met no one who lived up to his purely theoretical wifely ideal. Then, late at one particularly lavish ball in the Venetian style, he met a woman who hid behind a half-moon mask, and blinked at him with the innocence of a newborn calf. She was perfect.

They were married six months later, in the summer, after their parents had the opportunity to do the appropriate asking and checking, hemming and hawing. They married in the garden of their new home, a bright, warm manse in the suburbs. Monsieur Lutece would manage the English side of his father’s shipping business, and Madame would move between their city and country homes, and they were contented with this arrangement. Life was at last provided with a structure, a meaning, a definition.

But no one is so simple. Nothing has ever been so simple.

 

It was late in the evening on a December day, and Rosalind’s mother was calling from her bed.

“Rosalind?” 

There was no answer.

“Rosalind?”

Her mother’s voice, like creaking boughs, says that name in her dreams, sometimes. She’s never asked Robert if he hears it too.

She was downstairs when the call came, sitting in the window ledge with a book propped on her knees, and her skirt rucked up, feet planted against the wall. Not very ladylike, her mother might say, but Madame Lutece had taken to her bed a year ago, and her demands on Rosalind had dropped off swiftly after that. Too much drink, the servants whispered, glancing down the hall for the girl. The girl heard.

She slipped deeper into the alcove, closer to the cold window. It radiated ice through her skirt. “Rosalind?” Shrill this time.

She was reading a book about mechanics. This chapter was breaking down how locomotives functioned, piece by piece.

No more calls came from the bedroom. Late that night, the doctor shook his head over the end of the bed, and the servants lifted up the sheets to cover Madame Lutece’s face.

No one called Monsieur Lutece. Everyone knew better.

 

In the years that followed, life was different in the Lutece household. 

From the day she was born to the day her mother died, Rosalind had been a favorite target for her mother’s disappointment in her husband. That man had created this wretch, and someone should damn well pay for it. Monsieur Lutece, however, remained conveniently just beyond the scrape of Madame’s fingers. Rosalind, who spoke at eight months and had her times tables by three, was a much nearer target, and thus much easier to strike.

Madame Lutece drank. This was not even a secret. Those sought after seasons? Those wished for summers in the country? They never came. As her husband came home less and less from business in the city, Madame began to purchase fabulously expensive wines on his expanding salary. She claimed to store them in the wine cellar, but the wine cellar remained mostly empty.

It was the wine that did her in, in the end. One night she drank a bottle of Chateau L’eau and fell into the lake that bordered their property. The chill brought on consumption, and after that it was only a matter of time. Monsieur Lutece came home even less, but when he did he would often leave his wife’s bedside red-eyed, and bring Rosalind dolls she did not care to play with, but stacked in her window all the same.

 

Rosalind was 12. Madame has been dead two years. Her tutor was tapping a chalkboard, running through latin exercises. She began to recite avid Ovid, posture rigid, knuckles white around her knees with insane frustration. Better tutors. If Papa paid any attention at all, she could have better tutors.

 

Rosalind is 15. My, how time goes! In the summer she lies in the fields and reads, and she tries to calculate the number of blades of grass around her. She dreams of a hall of mirrors where she is duplicated a thousand times. One of the mirrors reflects back a version of herself where she is born a someone else, a person whose tutors do not look at each other, slightly uneasy of what the Monsieur will think of his child’s voracious appetite for knowledge. She wakes and feels alone like she has never felt, and buries her head in the heather, becoming invisible.

 

It is a remote childhood. There are few trips to the city, even fewer chances to see her father. When she asks for better tutors, he gets them. When she mails a list of books to his office, she receives them in the mail within the week. Before she is thirteen, she has torn through the book collection bequeathed to her parents when they purchased their home, sent by a grandfather she has still never met. She has cracked those spines and sucked out the marrow. Feral, she seeks intellectual conquests with voracity.

Her manners are impeccable, really, but she is distant with other children. Girls, boys, they all seem small. She likes adults, talking to them, taking all she can from them. She pins her red hair up in a bun, businesslike and tight, and refuses dresses with lace that might snag on something when she is investigating out of doors, or experimenting in the study. ‘The little lady’, the maids call her, at first with fondness and later with unease, when these childish behaviors continue into her later youth. The servants care for the house, and cook for her. The governess doesn’t quite know what to do with her, and instead busies herself with chasing after the chauffeur. Rosalind is cared for and taught, but effectively orphaned. Her father is much like a kind uncle - mystified, bemused, and contented that she hasn’t gotten into any serious trouble.

This is when she first creates her imaginary friend.

 

She names him Robert because of a song she heard once. It’s a good, strong name, Robert. Sensible.

She and Robert have everything in common. He stands beside her at her experiments, her silent partner. While she is trying out the latest set of chemicals her father has procured for her, or sketching out more and more complex equations on the blackboard in the study that her tutors once employed, he stands always and watches.

 

Rosalind was 16. She was standing outside her father’s study, listening to the debate. The college did not ordinarily accept women, but considering the strength of his daughter’s thesis, they would consider it. She would need to conduct herself with the highest level of decorum, however. No dallying with the male students. She could not, of course, live on campus grounds, or dine in the messes with the male students. 

“I would send her to a women’s college, you understand,” said her father, “But they simply do not have the same level of scholarship. She is fluent in French and Greek and her latin is miles past what I can still remember from my schoolboy days. She does not need a college for literature, languages, and party manners. I would return her to France to finish her schooling, but there they would offer how to rouge her cheeks and go to dances. She is a sober young lady with sober inclinations toward academia. You understand.”

“Then you are, perhaps, correct that our college is a more suitable fit,” said the dean. Rosalind heard the crisp rustling of linen as he stood. “I will discuss the matter with our board of regents. I am sure they will be understanding. Particularly considering your generous donation to our Physics wing. We shall see what we can do for Madame Lutece.”

Madame Lutece was her mother, and Rosalind didn’t like hearing the name. But it hardly mattered - she bit her lip, and tried not to let her excitement show. When the dean left her father’s study, they came face to face with one another. She had been so distracted that she hadn’t even remembered to pretend to be walking down the hall. She offered him an inclination of the head, then turned and moved in the other direction. She would be a student. She would have a laboratory.

 

Three years later, she stands in the New Lutece Physics Wing. It still smells of paint and acrid chemicals. Her dress is loose and light, absent a bustle, and she wears a leather apron like a butcher might. Her fine red hair is pulled up and away from her face in the same tight bun she has worn since she was nine years old. She begins to put the pieces of her good machine together.

Six months ago, she sent a prototype off to a shop to be assembled. They made such a crude mess of the internal connections that the ensuing explosion did in what remained of the Old Physics Wing. 

She is in the wing alone, tonight. She hardly sleeps, eats the small lunches she makes at home because she isn’t permitted in the men’s mess. She’s begun keeping a small stock of goods in a drawer of her desk. Next year they have offered to let her guest lecture, and she will have an office of her own. She is young, and female, and terribly well qualified. The college is enjoying the notoriety and murmured scandal of a brilliant, strange female academic in their midst, creating explosions and noise and publishing groundbreaking tomes on theoretical physics that are alternately lambasted for the sheer silliness of a lady studying the sciences with such tenacity and lauded for their revolutionary thinking. But now has come the time where theory no longer suits. She will be twenty in March. She stands outside herself sometimes and wonders what Robert would do in her position, living without the expectation that he be married in the next year or become a spinster. Robert, she knows, would continue to work. She takes some comfort in the idea of spinsterhood, just as she has found a way to forget her utter isolation in the midst of activity at the lab. No one takes lunches with her, and no one invites her to parties. The men go to clubs in the city after they finish their studies, and she stays, and studies, and builds.

This machine is the beginning of something. She can taste the flood of static copper and bright white metal and stone, the rush of electricity. She feels lucky indeed that electricity itself is easier to procure, now. In the building process, she designed a siphon for the local mill, allowing it to be built fully modernized with electric wiring. 

She is tired. At night, she sees shapes and wonders whose reflection she is viewing through the curtain that divides this minute from the next, this space from the space beside it. She still thinks about Robert sometimes, her imaginary friend. She wonders what he is doing now. She hasn’t imagined him by her side in her experiments for a very long time. As she has become even more alone, caring for herself more and more, so has he disappeared. She forgets him for long stretches.

She clicks the trigger and the welder fires to spitting life like a dragon out of fairy stories. Robert was a fairy story. She holds the fire of knowledge in her hand, philosopher and Prometheus, and she will be real.

 

The machine is done two days later. At last, her opportunity. In the past her designs have been constructed on the principles of earlier sciences, but this design is built entirely on the theorems she put forth in the book she published when she was seventeen. Her enthusiasm swept up several of the other students, and they have helped refine the plans. She has learned much about engineering, about threatening the bounds of the possible with power and crackling atoms. Standing close to the machine, her skin seems to sing.

“Are we prepared?” she asks. The entire physics department is there to attend the demonstration. She has never turned on the machine before, and if this one goes the way of the last, it will go to the grave with some of the finest minds in Britain.

She wears a cream colored dress with kid gloves, and they all wear goggles of tinted glass, small and round.

For a moment, Rosalind experiences something she has not felt since she was offered the chance to come to the college. She is afraid that she might get it wrong. She does not ordinarily fear failure, or let herself feel the bite of how very much she has to prove in order to be taken seriously. Today, though, all her nineteen years of work are ready to bear fruit.

Her father is not there, and she does not look for him. He is in his sickbed at the old manse, and the frantic letters of the servants summoning her home sit in an unopened pile on the desk in her study.

She grasps the switch to flood the machine with energy. It is a hulking thing that stretches twice her height, a mass of coils, wires, and connectors at the base, all hooked up to one small metal plate.

She yanks down on the switch, and it is if she has sent her will into the air itself. The machine blasts to life. The audience blanches. Bolts of electricity crackle down the coils and needles and into the minute mechanism beneath the plate, charging the air. 

At first, there is nothing. Then, she sees a gentle swirling in the air above the plate. She does not reach into it. She has no interest in losing a bit of herself to a loop of time and space.

There it is. Her work. It is a speck of dust only, but she watches it hover. It is moving but utterly still, transported as nothing ever has been before, moving, always, just a second backward in time, at pace.

The crowd does not see, not until she steps back and lets them crowd up. Then the stunned applause begins.

She feels many things, then. She feels joy. She feels as proud of that speck as if it were her child. She feels tall, as tall as any of the men in the room, and she lifts her delicate chin. Her fingers bear burns from the welder under those gloves, and she is light headed. She has _worked_. She feels exhaustion. She feels more alone than she ever has felt. Euphoria. And already, her thoughts sing forward. The speck floats, yes, but this principle could be applied to so much more than dust.

She wishes she could summon up Robert in her imagination, but she can’t quite remember what he looked like when she was a child, so the vision is imperfect. Like the machine, she lets all things drift backward.

 

Rosalind was 21. She has worked tirelessly on her theories in the year between the speck of dust and this, and at last she has made a breakthrough in her true passion, the one she can trace all the way back to that dream she had as a child. If she can manipulate the position of an atom, why can she not move it within the fabric that restricts this realm of possibility from a billion others?

 

She did not read speculative fiction. She did not while away her hours on idle daydreams. But she still sometimes imagined what Robert would be like at her age in the quiet nights. How would he style his fine red hair? Would he be more jovial than she, fit in better amongst his fellow men? What would he think of her?

It was a foolish proposition to begin with, of course. Robert did not exist, so he could think nothing about his creator except the thoughts she gave him. But like anything she had invented, she probed his edges and filled them out until the picture was complete, drawing more and more complex circles around him. She was trapped in the maze of him, badly tended, going on forever.

 

She begins work on her private project after she publishes her second book on the possibility of other universes, moving in tandem with their own but with a wholly different set of circumstances, manipulated by tiny changes in chance, probability, and which neurons fired to create decisions in the minds of men. 

The machine was a miniaturized version of the behemoth in the laboratory. She constructed it in the sitting room of the house her father bought for her. Days were spent teaching, nights were spent building. She slept a few hours a night and never, ever fell asleep at the lab, though she did sometimes slump over, tool in hand, in the sitting room.

She kept up appearances, but after her father’s death had revealed the depth of his embezzlement, she had been reduced to subsisting on her teaching salary and a small stipend from the grandfather she had now visited, once. She went to France the summer before to take in her namesake city. There had been much worth absorbing in Paris. Art at the Louvre - she was not immune to the charms of a finely tuned brush, the glimmer of light on gilt picture frames, or to the unique talents of the fine painter, one in a million in their skill. She had rented a flat in an old yellow building, purchased pain chocolat at a cafe, and read the newspaper on the sidewalk, drinking strong coffee.

Now she was back, prepared to work on the design she’d sketched out on one cloudy afternoon, wrapped up in bed beside a middling artist.

 

One long night that winter, she turns the machine on. It crackles, and the bulbs in the room dim with the pull of electricity into the machine. The plate spits energy, and her instruments go wild. She stares, and she waits.

She doesn’t know what she truly expects. She ought to expect nothing, merely record whether there is any reaction when the field, her field (They already call it ‘the Lutece field’ and she does not complain) captures a particle and begins to move it through time and space. 

Then the particle moves.

She stares. The particle is moving. Rather than holding in place and neatly levitating, as it should, it is bobbing up higher, then down again.

Rosalind stares. She pulls a pad of paper from her desk and sits down on the carpet, legs folded beneath her, and begins to write.

The bobbing is morse code. Of course it is. Whoever is on the other side may not know who or what manner of being they communicate with, but the fact that it is morse code shows that it is a human on the other end.

The speak the queen’s english, as well. There are words flowing from her pencil.

 _H E L L O_.

She is numb. She feels fear, that rarest of emotions. She sits on the carpet and watches the instruments register the fluctuations in the field. 

She was right. Not only was she right, there is someone else in another place who had the same idea. She shudders, and it brings to mind an old, superstitious phrase. Is it her, on the other end? A universe of probability away, who built this machine?

She reaches for the switch and yanks it down. The instruments register the drop. She begins flipping the switch on and off, over and over. Her curtains are drawn, but even so, passers by must see the flooding and cutting of light around the edges of her drapes onto the street. Up and down again, decisive and deliberate. She begins to take notes with her right hand, even as she spells out the morse code with her left. This will be a breakthrough to write a dozen books about. She must be prepared. She must not forget even a second of this moment.

 _N A M E_. She confirms for whoever shares this discovery with her that she does, indeed, exist. She has shared discoveries with colleagues before, but the feeling she has now is wholly different. It is as if she fully experiences something with another human for the first time, like her heart beats with another’s as they possess the same moment of triumph and terror together as one creature. It is love, as the old songs say it will be, and it sings into the machine.

The particle begins to bob again.

It’s an R, first, and then an 0, and the hair raises up on the back of Rosalind’s neck, an autonomic response to unexpected stiumuli, and it’s a _B_ , and her pen halts, and an _E_ comes next, and she stands up from the carpet and walks up to the machine, and an _R_ stutters and spits through electric impulses and the sharp yanking of someone else’s hand a universe away, and a _T_ comes through and Rosalind grips the handle of the machine and turns it off, she must turn it off, she must shut it off this instant.

In the aftermath, she curls up on one of the room’s large armchairs, and she lights a plug in one of her father’s best pipes. Smoke drifts from her mouth to the ceiling. Her hair is still wet from the bath, and she has left her underclothes upstairs, wrapped only in a richly colored silk robe. It was a gift from one of the other professors, an acquisition from his trip to the orient. He had given it to her with a distinct blush and begged her to open it at home. She thanked him kindly for it and that seemed to be all he had ever wanted - she imagines that him imagining her wearing it is quite enough. 

Pursuits of the flesh are mildly interesting to her at best, a nuisance to her creative process at the worst. She never intended to marry, not even to fund her experiments. But she has not been a chaste woman since Paris, which was its own relief. It ruled out marriage, in its own way, to leave that vestigial piece of inexperience behind her. 

She does not make such a crass comparison as to suggest the feeling she had when her legs gave out in front of the machine was anything sexual. Far from it. She draws her robe a little tighter around herself, and stares at the machine, filling the room with smoke. And she knows that this will not be enough. Nothing has ever been enough. There is always more. There is always better. And now she has a partner to conspire with. 

Rosalind was 23. She handed a clipboard of notes to her assistant, and surveyed the work on the balloon. Comstock was absent today, busy going about his duties as senator, even as she busied herself with the the hard science of making his city in the sky a reality. The irony was not lost on her, that she was building a floating metropolis with theoretical physics in honor of a god in which she did not believe, for a prophet who saw only what her discoveries allowed him to. The mystical and the mortal, all wrapped in a tight, neat bow. 

But none of it mattered. The hypocrisy had funded her after her father’s fortune turned out to be a lie, and sacrifices must be made in any pursuit. She wore a blue skirt and a green tie. The fashion for dresses that mirrored men’s fashions suited her. She never let them forget who she was, but she nodded to what they expected a scientist in her position to be. 

They are very close, now. She has seen the fabric of the world split and seen other worlds through it. Not the world or the time she seeks, yet, but when she learns to control the vagaries and variations of her machine, ah, then. She will be the oracle for Comstock until the judgement he awaits passes over the world. She will be Eve and the snake, and give him all the knowledge he seeks. She will be his devil. But with his end of the bargain, she will have all she has ever desired in this world - she will have the imaginary made real. She will be a match. 

Rosalind was twelve. In her ear, a woman whispers, “Robert.” She carries a parasol, and wears a neat tie, and she is strolling with a companion who tilts his head as he looks down. The child looks so sweet there, asleep in the grass. 


End file.
